World Class Education & Training

You can never get enough education and training. Isn't that the truth. After working in the private practice field for over 15 years you definitely know why it's called "private" practice for a reason. You get better with time. From day 1 you start learning from experiences and year after year you keep making changes and improvements.

My philosophy in running a private practice is very simple. Be small and nimble. Make changes at will that will increase efficiency and run the practice better. Have high standards for customer service, high on morals and ethics and perform at a high level from final results to the smallest details of the practice. Over the years the vast knowledge and experiences of running high profile high volume successful practices has allowed me to share my techniques. I'm very fortunate to be selected a consultant for Johnson & Johnson's Mentor Worldwide division where I have been able to share my best practices techniques.

Best Practices

Running a business is very challenging but here are some businesses that perform better than others. It happens in all industries. My goal as a consultant is to share best practices techniques to help my clients improve their businesses. Frequent education and training is a must. There are always new advancements, new technology and new ways of doing things. Keeping up with all these changes is required in today's competitive world.

How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. I help businesses solve problems or implement new ideas to try to improve their results. It can be overwhelming all the challenges that we face in business but tackling small pieces at a time works really well. In the end, you put together all the changes and improvements that you have implemented and over time you will see the results.

Mistakes are Ok

Don't be afraid of making mistakes. I'd rather try something and see if it works. If it doesn't work then you get the knowledge and experience to try something different next time. Learning from mistakes sometimes leads to finding other solutions. Now, I don't recommend repeating mistakes that's not good. As long as you make wise decisions after learning form any mistakes then it's a win in my book.

Teamwork

You can't do it all. Trust me I've tried. Working with highly trained professionals in a team is the best way to carry out all the work that needs to be done. I've been fortunate to work with high quality team members of the years and that's when it starts to be fun. Performing at a high level and achieving amazing results makes the day go by faster. Now it's not easy to find the right team members. Don't lose hope. The key is to have patience and carry out a great interview workflow to meet as many prospective employees as possible and find the people. Easier said than done I know. But over the years, if you continue to find the best team members will give you a solid team.

Genaro Guerra is top consultant helping companies achieve better results. His company Genaro, LLC is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Contact info: 480-463.4723

Last month, Google Mail started displaying an icon on emails that it can't verify as the legitimate sender. This used to be a Google Labs feature that you had to turn on yourself, but as of last month, Google rolled out an update to enable this feature for all users by default.

Why does this matter? Google Mail users will see a notice like so:

As time goes on, more and more businesses will set up their verification methods correctly and users might consider unauthenticated mail as spam, junk, or worse.

How do we set up authentication then? Our favorite mass mailing service Mailchimp has a great guide on the 3 authentication methods available today, along with a chart of support with mail providers. Mailchimp as a sender supports all 3 methods, but only if you configure your DNS. In fact, all 3 methods use DNS TXT records as the way your email provider checks for authentication.

SPF - Sender Policy Framework

SPF is the most commonly accepted means of authentication, and easiest to implement. The syntax guide is available here. All you need to do is create a TXT record for your domain (like genaro.com) with the value set as the appropriate syntax. For example, we have a webserver (genaro.com) that can send email, our primary email service (google apps for business), and our mass mailing service (mailchimp). Our SPF record value would be like so:

a:genaro.com means allow the server with an A record at genaro.com (our webserver)

include:_spf.google.com means give a pass if it is in the server list included at _spf.google.com (google mail)

include:servers.mcsv.net means give a pass if it is in the server list included at servers.mcsv.net (mailchimp)

~all means anything in this list is allowed, if not then give a soft failure warning. A soft fail in gmail shows the unauthenticated message, while a hard fail (-all) may be sent directly to the spam box or blocked completely.

If you use an email server controlled by you, you will want to make use of the mx rule.

Sender ID

Sender ID is a method proposed by Microsoft based on SPF, but has some changes to its features. Although it is denoted with v=spf2.0, it is not actually SPF version 2, rather it was an independent project that is now obsolete. Here is an article that explains some of the key differences. The SPF working group recommends that you can use v=spf2.0/mfrom to make it similar to SPF.

v=spf2.0/mfrom,pra would actually be more secure in theory, but it requires more configuration when you send mail. In practice it has shown to create a significant amount of rejected mail.

DKIM - DomainKeys Identified Mail

DKIM was created by Yahoo and is a bit different than the two methods above, in that it uses public key encryption and also requires an authentication string to be embedded into the email header. By doing this, it verifies that it was sent by a server authorized by you, and that the message was not tampered with in transit.

It is important to note that if you implement this method, all of your mail servers have to be capable of inserting the DKIM-Signature header into all outgoing emails.

First, you need to create the public and private key pair. A typical setup uses 1024-bit RSA encryption. Some mail services have a tool to let you do this (such as google). When asked for a selector, pick a simple word to describe this key, it can be anything but remember it for later. As with all public/private keys, keep the private key safe and secure - if someone else gets a hold of it, your security is compromised.

Like SPF, you need to create a DNS TXT record that reads like this:

k=rsa; p=yourpublickeystring

where yourpublickeystring is the 1024 bit public key that you generated. There should be no line breaks in the string.

On your email server side, you need to turn on DKIM so that it sends out the DKIM-Signature header. If you used it to create the key pair, it already has the information needed to do this. Otherwise, you will need to configure it, probably by providing both the private and public keys, and the selector you chose when creating the key. Again, make sure the private key is secure and only readable by the email server software.

I'm very fortunate to work with Cunning Dental Group in Montclair, California. They are a top cosmetic dentistry practice in Southern California and they have an annual corporate retreat. This is my second year attending their corporate retreat in Alaska and I've enjoyed spending quality time with the Cunning Dental team.